What do you do when a Monsanto executive asks to take a selfie together with the enthusiasm of a grandparent who has just discovered Twitter? You could, I guess, grin and bear it along with the spam musubi.

So here is Robb Fraley, chief technology officer of Monsanto and recent Twitter convert, after I interviewed him at WIRED. Fraley had just flown into town for an ag tech conference, and he arrived still sporting an “I Voted” sticker from Missouri’s primary that morning. As we sat down, he took out his phone, pulled up a tweet of both him and his wife with their voting stickers, and suggested for the first of many times that I follow him on Twitter.

If social media has collapsed the distance between civilians and celebrities, so too it might for civilians and, uh, corporate executives, right? Right? Monsanto execs: They’re just like us! But more to the point, the once closed-off company seems to be embracing a new media strategy: putting human faces on a faceless corporation.

In 2014, Monsanto hired a director of millennial engagement. (No, really, that’s his title.) Last year, it opened its doors in St. Louis for journalists on a food fellowship it co-funded. Fraley suggested several times I come visit, too, during our interview. He’s made himself remarkably available for a C-level exec of a multinational corporation. “You have Robb Fraley showing up to every principal event and giving out his card with his phone number to reporters,” says Nathanael Johnson, a writer at Grist who has reported extensively on GMOs.

The answer is much more dialogue, much more transparency. Three years ago there wouldn’t have been a Monsanto executive on Twitter. Robb Fraley

Fraley, a soft-spoken scientist, may not seem like most natural spokesperson for the ag tech company. But he does, as they say about politicians, have a hell of a life story. He grew up on a farm in Illinois, and he is quick to invoke his father pulling weeds from the soybean fields and calculating yields at the kitchen table by hand. “I for one, having grown up on a farm where my dad and my grandpa farmed, I have no desire to go back to the way they used to farm,” he says.

And Fraley himself has been a major force in changing that. In 1981, he came to work at Monsanto and helped figure out the technology behind the first genetically modified plant, a petunia. The same technology, used to add genes to soybeans, corn, and cotton, would become incredibly profitable for the company. Over 85 percent of these crops grown in the US are genetically modified.

Monsanto was originally a chemicals company, but as Fraley rose up to vice president and then co-president to Monsanto’s ag division, he figured out how to sell genetically modified seeds. A key part of Monsanto’s business are Roundup Ready crops, resistant to the herbicide Roundup, conveniently also a Monsanto product.

If Monsanto is going to continue to shape the future of agriculture, I asked Fraley, what do you imagine your grandchildren’s farm will look like? “Where farming is today is that farmers still buy their seed from one company, their chemicals from another, their fertilizers from another. They get their agronomic advice from someone else,” he said. “What farmers want and need is for all of those inputs to be integrated.”

I pushed back. Doesn’t the idea of integrated farming get to the heart of what people fear the most about Monsanto—that farmers will have to rely on just one company for everything?

Fraley deflected and pointed me to a LinkedIn blog post he’d written earlier in the week titled, “If Monsanto Rules the World, It’s Quite a Trick.” He dismissed the concern as conspiracy theory—a charge that is unfortunately easy to make when Monsanto’s least thoughtful critics spread actual conspiracy theories. But he’s also learned to engage strategically. In another LinkedIn post, he invited Neil Young to visit Monsanto after the musician came out with his anti-agribusiness screed of an album The Monsanto Years. “The invitation remains!”, Fraley later clarified to me via Twitter DM.

The GMO Backlash

Fraley admits that Monsanto whiffed on the introduction of GMOs to the public back in the 90s. “If I could have do one thing differently I would have focused on communicating to the public,” he said. Monsanto’s outreach efforts since, by soliciting scientists to write for the Genetic Literacy Project and giving money to scientists for outreach, have sometimes backfired. (In a truly bizarre story that recently came to light, a scientist who received a $25,000 grant from Monsanto went on a podcast hosted by his pseudonymous alter ego to talk about GMOs—only to announce the death of the podcast alter ego from choking on a “piece of gluten-free pizza” when a journalist started sniffing around.)

Monsanto is now about to launch its first product with a new technology called RNA interference, a strain of corn resistant to root worms. Gene-editing techniques like CRISPR are on the commercial horizon, too. Sharp observers have pointed out these technologies may not, under current regulations, count as GMOs, allowing Monsanto to evade the dreaded label and perhaps sell where GMOs are prohibited.

Fraley said he didn’t see it that way—though what he did say was telling, too. “Gene editing, I would look at it as somewhere between what you can do with sophisticated breeding with what you can do with the GMO technology,” he said. What’s even the difference? Monsanto’s traditional GMOs contain foreign DNA, like corn with a bacterial gene that kills pests munching on the corn. Gene-editing refers to tinkering with or knocking out a specific gene, without necessarily adding foreign DNA.

Fraley’s talking point is that genetic modification exists along a continuum, that humans have been genetically modifying crops ever since they first domesticated the puny wisp of a plant that was corn’s wild ancestor. For him, there is no bright line between breeding and tinkering with DNA. But your mileage may vary with that argument as where the bright line lies is less a question of objective science than what society is willing to accept. If it’s anyone responsibility to draw the line, it’s the regulators. So it may not be much comfort that US regulatory agencies are confused about new gene editing techniques, too.

Taking It to Twitter

In any case, Monsanto is working to rehab its image—not just by getting outside scientists to defend GMOs but directly engaging. “The answer is much more dialogue, much more transparency,” says Fraley. “Three years ago there wouldn’t have been a Monsanto executive on Twitter.” And certainly not a Monsanto executive posting selfies on Twitter.

Fraley told me he wants to talk to the silent majority on social media, not the activists on the either side. He has almost 7,500 followers on Twitter, most of them already GMO enthusiasts, it seems. After he mentioned me in that tweet, I expected the angry anti-GMO tweets that swarm my mentions every time I’ve written about GMOs. But the swarm never came. Monsanto’s VP of marketing retweeted the photo.

The former New York Times food writer Mark Bittman ran into Fraley at a Hawaiian news show doing a segment on GMOs—hence the Hawaiian shirts and spam musubi in that tweet above. Bittman has, of course, been a vocal critic of Monsanto’s business practices. “Doesn’t seem to have improved his reputation or harmed mine!,” he said in an email about their photo together.

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